In the heart of one of the most mysterious forests on the planet, the largest, the most inaccessible, sometimes the most hostile, the jaguar reigns supreme. But, for several years, its attacks have increased in Guyana against dogs and livestock. Faced with the Amazon's largest predator, the Guyanese are forced to rethink their relationship with their environment and their place in nature.
On Monday November 25 at 11:40 p.m., France 3 is offering a 52-minute episode of Thomas Izèbe: Guyana, living with the jaguar.
“The king of felines has always fascinated and nourished the imagination of the people of Guyana. An object of ancestral worship, but also an object of study and love, a tourist attraction, he leaves an indelible mark among those who live alongside him However, in recent years, the largest feline in South America has embodied a new danger, a threat.
In Guyana, in the wealthy suburb of Cayenne, a retiree experiences the fear of his life one morning when he faces a jaguar in his neighbor's garden! Totemic animal of the Amazonian forest, as stealthy as it is mysterious, what does a jaguar do in an inhabited area? This incursion is far from being an isolated act. The boundaries between men and the jaguar are shifting, two worlds cross at the risk of clashing. Two universes collide. From the depths of his old garden, the feline, and former master of the entire American continent, seems to question the new owners.
To date, the agglomeration of Cayenne brings together nearly 150,000 inhabitants, or a third of the Guyanese population. Real estate programs are spreading more and more over the peninsula and the forest, once omnipresent, is reduced to islands of nature where a whole range of wild life still thrives. How much space does everyone have left? How to coexist?
At the edge of homes, the most cunning king of the jungle would be like a whistleblower, whose repeated intrusions would sound like a warning. To understand it better, some people strive, on a daily basis, to know it better. However, this predator knows how to make itself invisible. Facing him, breeders, scientists, Amerindian scholars and a whole new generation of Guyanese who wish to rethink cohabitation with nature.
To find out why the jaguar is getting dangerously close to men, we must follow the feline throughout Guyana, everywhere where the ancestral, and oh so fragile, pact between man and wild life is being renegotiated, day after day.”
Photo credit © 13 Prods.
